With the increasing popularity of smartphones and wearables, there are more and more short range radio communication devices, e.g., Bluetooth devices, around us. With the increasing number of these devices around, the likelihood of scatternet scenarios also increases, in which, for example, a single device may serve as a slave of one piconet and a master of another piconet.
In a conventional scatternet scenario, the two piconets operate independently on their own respective piconet clocks and frequency hopping sequences. As the two respective piconet clocks are free running and not synchronized, the drift over time will result in communications traffic of the two piconets colliding with one another. During these collisions, time conflicts (a conflict to serve a master role or a slave role at the same time) and frequency conflicts (different piconets transmitting and receiving data on the same frequency channel) may occur. The time conflicts are addressed on an ad-hoc basis depending on the instantaneous priorities, however, this approach has its limitations and does not address frequency conflicts.